There should be no 'nope' button for unwanted followers, the same where there isn't in a real life scenario. There are methods in place that allow you to try and shake your attacker. One is overwhelmingly effective but with a tiny bit of risk (flee self). But as in real life, you're left with the options of shake them, trick them, report them to someone who can do something about it, or confront them.

There's no way to consider it code abuse. It's using the code in place for its expressed purpose. HOWEVER. It is gimmicky. There have been threads about stealth where we discussed 'shadow' versus 'follow', and I really think a more dynamic follow that requires the watch skill and establishes a 'follow' range (two rooms away, safer, less chance of detection than one room away, but 'watch' failure results in space being gained by the followee) should altogether be on the list of implementations, along with some sort of consent for following (AFTER that other dynamic hostile follow is in place).

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She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together. --J.D. Salinger

It's already twinkish to me if you walk into a "room" on the Salt Flats, for instance, and punch follow and watch or just straight up initiate combat like an aggro-NPC without even emoting your arrival first.

Don't worry, mate. There will be time for roleplay when you are incapped and have given OOC consent.

Apparently, someone somewhere in the world is using the follow command for PvP. I've never seen it. It hadn't even occurred to me to use it that way 'till now.

Flee self can be used to get rid of said raiders. I don't really see why having a less immersion-breaking command to lose friendly followers would affect anything. It'd just allow us to stop dragging people around on accident, which happens far more than some hypothetical raider scenario.

This thread is dumb.

Nobody uses follow in PvP because it's useless in PvP, as currently coded, because you can simply type 'unhitch' with a stacked movement command, and that's the end of it. That is...kind of the problem, as I see it. It's magick. "I'm following you." "No you're not." Unhitching someone is practically powergaming unless they're linkdead or just utterly not paying attention. If you catch someone shadowing you and you unhitch them, I'd be tempted to consider that to be abuse of code--except in edge cases where they're about to follow you through a guarded door or whatever. If movement delay were increased by a fair amount, it wouldn't be an issue, but when running in most places, on most mounts, latency and reaction time slowly adds up to be greater than movement delay, and the leader always wins.

Ultimately though, this is something that is only going to be resolved by slowing movement WAAAY down, and implementing an intra-room location coordinate system like Accursed Lands. I think the reason so many people are reacting viscerally to this without giving it the thought it deserves is because of the ambiguity regarding the "nearness" of a follow. Codewise, within a second of being in the same room as someone, you may as well be standing RIGHT NEXT TO THEM BREATHING DOWN THEIR NECK, and yeah, that's stupid...so of course the initial reaction is to not want to increase the likelihood of being the victim in that scenario, because nobody wants to be the loser in someone else's story. So yeah, most people don't want to lose their magick escape button, but that doesn't mean the escape button either a) makes any sort of realistic sense or b) is good game design (regardless of how long it's been like this).

Obviously, implementing a within-room grid and slowing down movement would be a massive code undertaking that probably is never going to happen. However, a decent interim step is to allow someone to hard-codedly follow whoever they want, unless the leader takes some sort of realistic action to evade. You could still break follow with a flee self and run, you could still take advantage of being faster or being on a faster mount, etc. etc. I'm not saying that you should be permanently shackled to whoever decides to follow you, no matter what, but I get the feeling that this is how the idea is mistakenly being received.

E.g. a city-elf pickpocket with AI agility at no problem encumbrance with full 120/120 stamina, guild-maxed sneak, hide, and flee, wearing footpads, in the bazaar would be virtually impossible to successfully follow. Almost nobody should be able to follow this guy without some sort of magick or psionic tracking, unless they were evenly matched, and even then I would be perfectly fine with there being a consistent bias in favor of the fleeing party, as long as it wasn't egregious.

E.g. A city-elf assassin/protector with AI agility at no problem encumbrance with full 110/110 stamina, and guild-maxed watch and scan should be able to tail virtually anyone, anywhere in the city that isn't behind a guarded door/gate. Few people should be able to "simply" shake this guy--it's going to require some sort of expertise. He's fast, he's light, the city is his oyster, and if you want him off your ass, you're going to have to -do something- about it.

I'm with Synthesis on this one. If you're being followed, the onus is on you to no longer be followed. You can run and hope you're faster. Seems legit. You can try to lose the tail and hope you don't get lost. Flee self. You can try to hide, and hope they can't find you. But just unhitching some guy who is following you feels lame and metagamey. That ain't how it works, folks (except when it is).

You seem to be complaining about raiders who want to rp with you rather than kill/ charge/ shoot man. Shadow and follow are completely legitimate tools, if someone is following you, and you turn around and say no, it won't stop them following you. The code works well for realism, in this way, barring unhitch.

This is a non-issue. If you want to lose a tail flee is the coded response. Synthesis is spot on with his spiel there.

« Last Edit: July 15, 2017, 05:06:04 AM by Inks »

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Quote from: Is Friday

Quote from: Synthesis

I hate to break it to you noobs, but penetration isn't the only way to achieve orgasm.Do I have to fucking explain everything here?

You seem to be complaining about raiders who want to rp with you rather than kill/ charge/ shoot man. Shadow and follow are completely legitimate tools, if someone is following you, and you turn around and say no, it won't stop them following you. The code works well for realism, in this way, barring unhitch.

This is a non-issue. If you want to lose a tail flee is the coded response. Synthesis is spot on with his spiel there.

First? Yes. Use the shadow code. Folks can't unhitch you if you're shadowing. So you're right, it's a non-issue. Stop using Follow to Shadow.

And no. What the unhitch folks are saying is that 99% of the time follow is being used it has nothing to do with raiders or pickpockets or anyone in a remotely aggressive way. It's to lead a group of folks around from point A to point B. And when you get to point B, being able to drop them off there, potentially in a room full of <keywords> without needing to remember everyone in the gaggle of follower, type key . and unhitch <every single keyword there> to go get the next bunch of folks you need to go pick up.

If I was worried about the 1% situation Synthesis is talking about? And I wanted to stop a raider from using the follow code to follow me? I would just type unhitch <raider>, follow <raider>. Now the raider can't follow me, because I'm already following them. Brilliant right? Code as intended right? Then spam movement commands. But I wouldn't because (a) that's not how I respond to other folks wandering into a room I'm in and (b) that's even more abusive of the follow code which is useful for soooo many other things.

Back to the first point. If you want to aggressively follow someone. Use Shadow. Alternatively, introduce the chase skill suggested above to follow someone that doesn't want to be followed if for some reason the Shadow skill is unacceptable.

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Quote from: BadSkeelz

Ah well you should just kill those PCs. They're not worth the time of plotting creatively against.

You're standing in a middle of the open area. A comes in closer to you and tells you that he will follow you no matter what. How would you possibly stop him? You can turn around and run. That's flee self. You can knock him out. That's kill man. You can attack him, reel him to give him a delay, and then flee self. That's both kill and flee self.

unhitch all is an equivalent of you turning around, beginning to walk, and finding it unfair that he dares to follow you after all.

It Makes No Sense.

What do you do if you're about to enter an apartment and a strange dude comes up behind you, clearly intend on walking into your place alongside you. What do you do? Tell him you've unhitched him?

If you unhitch someone whom you dont want to follow you and they refollowed. Well guess what, they ARE aggressively following you, despite your wishes. At this point you can either switch to run and run until they lose track of you. That's already in the code. And that's one code that Celves are codedly good at. Or you can trick them, or hide, or bring them to a militia and have them arrested. Or you can knock them out. There is no realistic real life equivalent of unhitch all, when someone is bent on following you no matter what.

It only becomes abuse, if someone continues to do this in order for you to drive them through the guard. In which case you should definitely wish up and report. If this is a compound, just bring him into the compound and kill the guy. Every surrounding NPC will help destroy him. If the guy is indeed trying to get past a apartment guard, you can deal with it like a dude trying to get through the locked door of an apartment building. You've opened it because you live there, someone is trying to follow you in, and ... you either do not want him and raise a stink, or ... dont give a shit.

I think a lot of the (city side anyway) bitching about people using follow isn't particularly people using follow.

It's people using shadow and FAILING.

A lot of times I've thought, "Ha, I'll shadow this person somewhere and kill/spy/pickpocket them." And about four rooms down the street it's "You notice: A doe-eyed, wealthy noble's aide turns and looks at you."

DOH.

There's probably an equal number of times I failed shadow but the dingledork had just spammed directions and didn't realize I was on their tail until they reached their destination (a closed room) and the magical stick of mischief got etwo'd.

I think a lot of the (city side anyway) bitching about people using follow isn't particularly people using follow.

It's people using shadow and FAILING.

Honestly? No.

It's about moving groups of people (like a Byn sergeant for one example returning from a ride or an aide shepherding people inside a Noble's estate) and needing to unhitch everyone before you can run to the next thing you have to do. That's what it's about. And it's not even bitching, it's saying, "Hey, being able to do this all at once would be awesome".

I can honestly say it never occurred to me to use follow to chase someone, until folks brought it up.

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Quote from: BadSkeelz

Ah well you should just kill those PCs. They're not worth the time of plotting creatively against.

Eh, like I said somewhere else before, I've had folks hitch up randomly while I was standing around or moving through town and I've stopped completely, emoted a turn and stared deeply into their ocular sockets before unhitching them and emoting a step back. Usually before I can type out a question as to why they're so close, they've run off with no response. Folks seem to go away if you're all like:

So.. eh. I'm not gonna flail like a muppet and run away if someone hitches to me in the Gaj. I'll just keep doing what I'm doing. The sands, I might evaluate other options. It's all about circumstance. If a thief wants to cling to your ass while walking through the city, guide your new found companion to a soldier and introduce them, I dunno. Friendship is Magic!

What does it matter anyway? For all you know, at any given time of the day we're all leading our own mile-long string of pantomiming, lip-synching street performers. You only saw the person who MESSED UP.

This is a pretty cool command, this chase thing, as it attempts to prevent command-spamming as a mud combat mechanism, thank goodness. That sounded downright silly. I never really spammed follow in a chase attempt before, and now I likely won't use it on anything but maybe fleeing mobs, and that sounds risky to me, but if the people wanted it, and they got it, that's cool. I take a more passive approach to PK myself.

My question is when I have to "flee self" and therefore run in a codedly random direction, to escape a follower, is there any way to control which direction I "flee self" in?

"flee self w" would attempt a flee even though not in combat, and try to steer you west. (a flee check fail means you might go in another direction).

Is this possible?

BTW, could we add a bit in the "Chase" helpfile about using "flee self" to get away from it? I never knew that "flee self" had actual function before, and someone might think to type 'help chase' when trying to figure out how to escape someone, and may not know the coded command to escape this new code feature. Thank you if you do and thanks again for another code addition!

My question is when I have to "flee self" and therefore run in a codedly random direction, to escape a follower, is there any way to control which direction I "flee self" in?

Great change. It also looks as if you can shake a chaser by climbing. The flee self stuff is in 'help flee', but I agree it might well be added to help chase too.

The short of an answer is that, no, flee self is no directional. However, IIRC, there /was/ a change to flee self that disabled fleeing up, which resulted in some silly results. So fleeing in a random direction strikes me as a great risk to the reward of shaking a tail. (You can also try to outrun them [go erdlus!] or jump off a cliff/climb up a mountain.)

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as IF you didn't just have them unconscious, naked, and helpless in the street 4 minutes ago